PSIM and data analytics: powerful solution for safe city

PSIM, or physical security information management, is an effective incident management tool with applications in different industries. Together with analytics, they form a powerful solution for safe city projects, which aim to detect potential emergency situations early on and, in case they happen, deal with them in the quickest manner.

The PSIM receives signals from various sensors deployed throughout the city. These sensors can include video feeds from different sources, such as citywide surveillance cameras, cameras on police vehicles and helicopters, and even body-worn cameras, which have increasingly become standard equipment for law enforcement officers across the globe.

Other sensors include traffic monitoring and control systems, which can signal a traffic logjam to the PSIM, which can then formulate response measures. Weather and environmental monitoring systems are another source of data for the control room. “Real-time sensors are critical, but so are the associated predictions,” said Bob Banerjee, Senior Director Training and Knowledge at NICE Systems. “Knowing that over the past four hours there are two inches of snow is useful because you can react, but suspecting that another six inches will fall in the next two hours enables you to be proactive.”

Once something happens, alerting the right authorities and telling them the right information is a task that can be difficult as the situation can get quite chaotic and messy. “The real problem is really three-fold: ensuring you have the right information to give; ensuring you know who to give it to; and ensuring that they have acknowledged that they received it,” Banerjee said. “The situation management platforms have features designed to keep everyone on a common operating picture.”

By integrating PSIM to a mass notification system, people can be informed of the situation via public address broadcasts, e-mail, text, or phone calls. “Without delay, the right message reaches the right people,” he said. “The lack of a delay is the key difference here, because it can help those that get the message to take immediate action.”

In order to optimize PSIM’s performance, data solutions are integrated with it to add to the PSIM’s analytics power. “At first, data analytics tells us what’s happening and how often it happens. Then, it correlates the data and sees if there are any causal relationships between them. In the end, it predicts when the same thing might happen again,” said Eric Leung, Enterprise Solution Senior Manager for Taiwan at Dell. “Data analytics allows us to gain insights into the future and take proactive, preventive action.”

“PSIM mostly deals with response – that is, alerting operators of certain events and helping them take action. But we focus on the long-term forecast, predicting what might happen in the future so operators can take appropriate action now,” he added. “From our perspective, we enhance and optimize PSIM.”